Memphis has always been an airport that punched above its weight, but that all fell apart when Delta shut down the hub, and the airport has been left to pick up the pieces. Its solution has been to shrink and shrink again, demolishing much of what made it work as a hub in the first place. What’s left is a small but nicely-renovated facility.
We can, of course, set aside the massive FedEx facility that lies at the north end of the field and has made Memphis into one of the most important cargo airports in the world. That is obviously key for the airport, but we’re here to talk about commercial service. That is where the problem lies.
Memphis was at one time the home of Chicago & Southern, the airline that was bought by Delta in the 1950s. Post-deregulation, Memphis became Republic’s southern hub. And when Republic was merged into Northwest, that status stayed. The twin mega-hubs of Minneapolis/St Paul and Detroit needed a southern counterpart. Memphis filled that role up until the bitter end when Delta took over Northwest, the second Delta acquistion to hurt the airport.
At the time of that merger, the airport had three concourses with more than 60 gates. The A gates were on the left side in the image below with the C gates on the right. And the Y at the bottom was all called concourse B.
In 2005, Memphis had more than 275 daily departures on average and 7.7 million departing seats, easily surpassing Nashville which didn’t even top 200 daily. It held fairly firm until 2010 when the wheels fell off. The hub was shuttered. By 2014, it was down to fewer than 75 daily flights with just over 2.2 million seats. Things have not improved.
By 2024, Memphis was down to about 65 daily departures while Nashville had surged above 280. The glory days were over, and they weren’t coming back. So what else could Memphis do but shrink?
It had massive infrastructure designed for a huge hub, and it didn’t think it was necessary to build a completely new facility. So the airport just started closing things off. Here is what ended up happening:
Efforts were poured into improving the B concourse. The connector from the headhouse and the southeast concourse were expanded and fully renovated to create a much better experience (in blue). The lonely southwest part of the concourse, however, is now only used for customs on international arrivals. Best I can tell, that only serves infrequent and seasonal flights to Cancún on Viva.
Meanwhile, the southern ends of both the A and C concourses were demolished while the rest of those concourses held all the traffic during the Concourse B renovation. When the renovated Concourse B opened in 2022, the rest of A and C were closed off to the public. The remaining A gates (in red) are currently being demolished with work done early next year. The C gates (in orange) are shut to the public, awaiting a decision on their final fate.
Memphis is now down to a lonely 25 gates, including the two on the international concourse. I haven’t been, but I hear it’s a pretty nice experience with the wider concourses and all that. It’ll be even better when the work is done on the headhouse to improve passenger flow.
It’s hard to believe that there was so much more to this airport back in the hub heyday, but now it’s just a minor airport with fewer departures than Louisville but just a little more than Norfolk. That’s quite the fall.
